Open Source Startup Podcast

Russ d'Sa is Founder of LiveKit, the real-time streaming audio, video, and data infrastructure platform for developers. Their open source project, also called livekit, provides the end-to-end stack for WebRTC and has over 6K stars on GitHub. In this episode, we dig into LiveKit's unique founding story with the idea coming from the founders' experience building a Clubhouse competitor and using Agora, early interest from companies like Pinterest that gave indications that there was a need for an open source alternative to Agora and Twilio, why Conversational AI will be a big driver for LiveKit & more!

Jeu George, Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, talks about the Conductor project journey, challenges of deploying microservices, utilizing customer feedback for product roadmap, developer playground and content strategy, exploring use cases and competitors, and importance of targeting developers in an open-source project.

We learn about the evolution of browser-based coding, how Coder improved developer experience, their early focus on enterprise customers, the origins and traction of Code Server, their fundraising efforts, and growing the community and achieving early momentum.

Charlie Marsh, Founder & CEO of Astral, builders of next-gen python tooling, talks about their journey in developing a Python linter and code formatter written in Rust. They discuss the impact of building with Rust, developing deep relationships with their community, and their plans for expanding their Python tooling. They also share insights and advice for open source founders.

Jeff Cross is Co-Founder & CEO of Nx, the build system for maintaining and scaling monorepos, both locally and on CI. Their project, also called nx, has over 20K stars on GitHub. Nx has raised $25M from investors including a16z & Nexus. In this episode, we discuss the benefits of using monorepos and the types of teams and codebases it works well for, crucible moments for the company (ie. when they went beyond the Angular framework), learning how to support large enterprise customers by starting a consulting business first, what great DevEx means to them (speed, automatic migrations, scale) & more!

Kyle Mathews is Co-Founder & CTO of Gatsby, the front-end web development platform. Their open source framework, GatsbyJS, is widely adopted with 55K GitHub Stars. In Feb 2023, Gatsby was acquired by Netlify. In this episode, we discuss how GatsbyJS was able to grow incredibly fast, what features matter most for front-end development frameworks (speed, approachability, etc.), learnings from going after a smaller portion of the market and over-hiring & more!

Pranay Prateek discusses founding Signoz, an open source observability platform, with a focus on tracing, logs, and metrics. They raised $7M from investors. The evolution of observability solutions, the importance of open source, and the growth of OpenTelemetry are key topics. They also touch on the release of logs, simple pricing strategies, and the challenges of managing open-source projects.

Mars Lan is Co-Founder and CTO of Metaphor, the modern data catalog that is described as the "Social Platform for Data." Metaphor was created by the founders of ⁠DataHub⁠ which is known as the leading open source metadata platform. Metaphor has raised over $10M from investors including Amplify, a16z, and Point72 Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the story behind Metaphor's creation - and why the team didn't build a managed service on top of DataHub, why Metaphor isn't open source, why sales funnel is the biggest benefit of building a company using open source & much more! For more on Metaphor's story, check out the link here

Moses Guttmann, CEO of ClearML, discusses the importance of automation and building multiple components for a comprehensive solution. They also talk about the shift towards using LLMs and challenges in building and scaling enterprise information access solutions. Moses provides advice to founders in the LLM or ML Ops fields on building and monetizing open source projects.

Tianqi Chen, Co-Founder and Chief Technologist of OctoML, discusses the importance of supporting multiple models, advancements in Llama and Stable Diffusion, building TVM and OctoML communities, predictions on GenAI in enterprise, and challenges in starting a MLAI company.